This
poem often gets read at national and international conferences on water policy.

What’s water?

Water
is far from a simple commodity

Water’s
a sociological oddity

Water’s
a pasture for science to forage in

Water’s
a mark of our dubious origin

Water’s
a link with a distant futurity

Water’s
a symbol of ritual purity

Water
is politics, water’s religion

Water
is just about anyone’s pigeon

Water
is frightening, water’s endearing

Water’s
a lot more than mere engineering

Water
is tragical, water is comical

Water
is far from the Pure Economical.

So
studies of water, though free of aridity,
Are apt to produce a good deal of turbidity.

Written
by the great economist Kenneth Boulding, it is a fine poem.It scans, the rhymes are strong and unforced, and it chimes strongly with
our sense that there is something special about water.

But
the underlying sentiment is wrong.All
wrong.Water is not special.It is a natural resource, which obeys the laws of economics like any
other.This matters because of
those readings at the water conferences.

They goes like this.A health expert
speaks on the vital need for clean water, an engineer shows how it can be
delivered, and an economist shows the benefits of pricing and of secure property
rights.

Then
an environmentalist stands up and says that’s all very well but:

“Water
is special.Water is too important
to be left to the market.It’s
wrong to make profits from water.Water
must be free.”

The
environmentalist then reads this poem, usually omitting the last two lines, so
it ends with the line "water is far from the Pure Economical."

Instead of
justly laughing the environmentalist off the stage, the well-watered
audience sighs in agreement and the
conference report fails to advocate privatisation and secure water rights.

Unsurprisingly
politicians take fright at water reform and the local water company remains
nationalised.Water remains
under-priced, misallocated and polluted, and the children who drink it
keep dying of diarrhoeal diseases.

I’m
not suggesting that this poem is responsible for as many deaths as
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring[1].But if it prevented the introduction of even one sensible water policy, it will indirectly have killed some.

Poetry
is powerful.It can also be
deadly.

Jim
Thornton, Lahore. April 2006

[1] By some estimates three
billion avoidable deaths, largely from malaria, were caused by the worldwide
ban on DDT which resulted from Carson’s book. Click
here